When I look back at my IT history, there are not many occasions where I met or dealt with females, tho I don't think it is really IT-specific. I also don't know many females in chemistry or in any other area.

But in these rare occasions where I did, it was always a great experience, and I hope that it wasn't only me who felt that way.

I've had female coworkers who were clearly better than me. No problem. There are many - well maybe not that many, but still - Debian developers who are women - I'm no DD, so they have the same respect from my side like men. And who wouldn't know TC, especially here, or people like Evi Nemeth? Even J.C. Herz comes to my mind, tho nowadays she might be consulting the troops with all her knowledge - something I would rather not be doing.

I remember when I met my own wife, and taught her the first steps in HTML. Now, she's far better in CSS and XHTML than me, and maybe also in MySQL and in PHP. It's always a matter of how deep you like to dig into the problems, right? And I still have to find the area where I would like to get into really knee-deep. My former boss always "sold" me as the security guy, but then - it's nice to share in-depth knowledge amongst equals, right? No matter if we're male or female.

It makes me sad to hear horror stories, and reading good stuff like yours gives me some hope.